Paper Tigers
by Metrophor
Summary: Post-Broken Steel, two old adversaries on the run from the East Coast Brotherhood find refuge, and some common ground. Colonel Autumn F!Lone Wanderer, part of a series of vignettes. Originally written as a prompt on Tumblr, for other people who like authoritarian old men, and broken girls who refuse to stay down.


"When I was five years old," said Sabine, "I fell down the stairs and broke my arm."

Outside the military bunker, the storm scoured the surface of the wasteland, pelting the reinforced concrete with debris and radioactive rain. Thunder walked in the clouds, and Colonel Autumn's shoulders tensed involuntarily. He hated the sound. Even down here, muffled as it was, it reminded him of distant explosions.

He ran his thumb over the engraving in his lighter. It had been his father's, the only thing he had left of Autumn Sr. aside from some yellowed photos and scattered field notes. The Enclave's flight from the West Coast had been confused and hasty, a domino effect set off by the destruction of the Poseidon oil rig. Autumn snapped his thumb down over the striker, and took a slow drag on his cigarette. "I'm not seein' the significance."

The girl he was addressing, the so-called 'Lone Wanderer', met his gaze smoothly from across the makeshift hospital bed. The deep shadows lining her eyes made them look bruised and sunken, the overhead light turning her skin sallow, like old parchment. She ran her fingers, slowly, across the sheet of paper in front of her, smoothing the creases out. The surface of the bed was littered with scraps: torn labels from soup cans and brightly patterned magazine pages, notebook sheets and carefully-stacked old world money.

"James… _Papa_ was always so busy," she explained. "He was the only doctor, and he couldn't bring me with him into the medical wing; I think he was afraid I would knock something over, or get into the medications. Cut myself on something sharp." Sabine set her palm sideways on the paper, grabbing one of the edges in her free hand and biting her lip in concentration as she folded it inward. "He'd leave me with the other families while he worked."

Why James had left her with Ellen DeLoria, she'd never understood. Maybe, in his absentminded way, he'd thought she'd be safe with a fellow parent. She remembered spending most of the time avoiding a sullen Butch, who'd shoved her into the closet once in childish rebellion, and locked the door. She'd being in there for an hour until Ellen finally woke up from her vodka stupor, and asked her (cigarette dangling from her lips and a bemused expression on her face) if she was still playing hide and seek.

"I don't think he ever really meant to hurt me." She folded the other corner of the paper, smoothing it down with painstaking care. "He just thought it was a fun game, taking things and making me run after him. And the steps down to the Vault pool were always wet…" She paused, and even in the dim light, Autumn could see her fingers trembling against the thin cotton sheet. "Amata found me at the bottom of the stairs. Papa told me later that she wouldn't leave until he set the break."

"This story have a point to it?" Autumn asked, mouth twisting. He flicked the butt of the cigarette, sending ash cascading to the concrete floor, and ignored her glare of disapproval.

"Yes. That's when he started making the paper cranes." She blew gently into the paper she held in her hands. Pointed wings unfurled. A geometric back, printed with a faded white picket fence against a backdrop of blue sky, expanded. Sabine smoothed her fingers along its beak, almost tenderly, shaping it into a point. "He'd make one for me every day, and hang them up over my bed."

Autumn took a step closer, pulling the faded, dog-eared book from under her arm. It had been repaired so many times, with tape and string, that when he opened it he thought it might fall apart in his hands. The text was so blurred with age and wear as to be almost indecipherable, but the diagrams were clear enough: a cat on this page. A bird. A delicately poised animal he'd never seen before, with four spindly legs for balance, and two more raised like hooks.

" _Zhe jiao zhèzhi_." The book dipped slightly as Sabine pointed to the first row of characters. "This is called _origami_."

Autumn squinted at the characters, as if by frowning at them hard enough, he could force them to make sense. "He said the book was my mother's." She chewed her lip, her teeth worrying the chapped skin, a nervous habit she'd never quite grown out of. "I don't know how he smuggled it past the Overseer."

"He folded cranes?"

She nodded, slowly. Every day, without fail, she'd wake up to find a few more, piled on her dresser or hung above her mattress, plain and patterned, white and blue and red. Eventually there were so many that they'd rustle when the overhead fan blew them into one another, the sound lulling her to sleep. She loved to stare at the light shining through them. It made her feel like she was underwater, staring up from the bottom of the pool.

"It was something my mother said. She said if someone folded a thousand cranes, God would grant them a wish. I suppose he was wishing for me to get better."

Autumn sighed, flicking the cigarette to the floor and crushing it out with his boot. "So, this is about your unresolved daddy issues, that it?"

Salt stung Sabine's lip, and the sharp pain told her she'd bitten through it. "Don't you dare patronize me." Her hand tightened and she crumpled the crane as easily as an autumn leaf, snapping its wings, crushing its fragile chest. "He couldn't look at me," she told Autumn, biting her words off savagely as her fingers curled inward. "The only reason I'm outside is because of him, and after Braun, he couldn't even look." The lump of paper dropped to the floor.

Privately, Autumn could understand Dr. Pavlichenko's shock. He'd seen her brute-force prostheses himself, before they were replaced with Enclave tech: scrap metal and bits of wire, scavenged from damaged robots and the gutted remains of pre-war cars, jury rigged into interfacing with her nervous system and wrapped with nothing more than sacking and electrical tape.

 _How must it have felt_ , he wondered, _to be pulled out of Braun's simulation by the daughter you'd raised since infancy, only to realize she'd become a monster?_

Sabine's shoulders trembled as she dragged her alabaster fingers over her head, pushing back the feathery growth of her hair. Though it had grown since she'd stumbled, burning with fever, into their camp two weeks ago, it still wasn't long enough to cover the long, ugly sickle of inflamed tissue that sliced horizontally over her scalp. "I told him I was going back to the vault. If he cared about his project so damn much, he could do it without me."

She glared at Autumn as he sank into the chair beside her, the deliberately turned to face the wall. He stooped, turning the crumpled origami crane over in his gloved hands.

"I found all the ones he folded for me," Sabine said. Like a dwarf star, she couldn't maintain her heat for long, and now she simply sounded tired. "All of them. They were right where I left them. I'd never had the heart to throw them out." She held out a hand: a narrow, feminine wrist connected to an expressive palm, terminating in five delicate fingers. In the low light, he might have mistaken advanced cybernetics for ordinary skin and bone, if not for their alabaster shine. "Give me a cigarette."

Her audience arched an eyebrow at the request, leaning back in his chair. "Didn't think you'd be interested," he mused, "your father being a doctor and all." Sabine didn't respond to the jab, and he had to tap the cylinder against her shoulder to get her to turn. "Seem to recall you as the Med-X type, actually."

The corner of Sabine's mouth twitched, slightly. It might have almost been a smile, but with the lingering nerve damage on that side of her face, it was hard to tell. She leaned forward as he lit the cigarette, setting her split lip against the filter. The gas flame briefly reflected icy blue, _Eden_ blue, in the lens of her false eye. "I suppose we should stop assuming things about each other."

She took the cigarette from him, and for just a moment, her mechanical fingers brushed against his glove.

"I burned them," she continued, letting the silence stretch until it had almost become uncomfortable. "The cranes. I threw them on one of the fires they started in the Vault. After the riots, I guess they just let some things go." Pale blue smoke coiled in her sigh, filtering toward the ceiling. "I was such a stupid little girl. Throwing a tantrum, because her father wasn't paying attention."

She passed the cigarette back to the Colonel, his hand cradling her wrist as he leaned forward to meet her. "They told me he was dead when I got to the Citadel. I believed them, for a while. Until I heard you on the radio." Sabine's throat clicked. "I took every piece of paper I could find. I thought, maybe, if I could just fold enough of them, he could come back. You did." Her hand relaxed, and she pulled away from him. "I couldn't fold the paper. Not enough motor control." Her laugh caught in her throat. It tasted bitter, like iron, on her tongue.

"He gave up everything for that damn project, and nobody even remembers it was his. I don't know why I'm still bothering." She brought her hand down sharply, and crushed the cigarette out in her palm, smearing the pristine white with a dull black crater. "I don't believe in God. And I don't have anyone else to fold them for."

"Show me." Autumn's voice was low, almost intimate, his breath stirring the hair against her ear, as he set the book open across her lap. "I'm not getting any sleep tonight either. Show me how to make these."

Coarse black leather closed over her fingers, startling her, but Autumn's grip steadied her as she tried to pull away. Something scraped, lightly, against her palm, and she stared at it mutely as the room blurred around her.

He cupped her hands in his, cradling what was left of the mangled crane.

Slowly, painstakingly, he straightened its wings.

Notes:

Technically speaking, the type of origami Sabine is making, and the legend behind it, is Japanese (zhèzhi papercraft mostly involves man-made objects rather than animals), which isn't really in keeping with her (partly) Chinese-American ethnic heritage. For this, I apologize, and am taking some liberties on account of 1.) this is set in America, 2.) after a nuclear war, and 3.) culture's probably been tossed in a blender.


End file.
